Dienstag, 27. Februar 2007

Intypo is a plug-in for the popular blog software WordPress. It is an output formatting filter, just like the original wptexturize() function, but with several options, especially for languages other than English.

Intypo does not alter the stored text of your posts, so you can safely give it a try. Just deactivate or delete the plugin, if you don’t like it, and everything will be as before.

What Intypo does is filtering the text of your posts when they are displayed to the readers of your blog, and then replacing some characters for a better typography. This again is default WordPress behaviour, but using Intypo, you as the administrator of the blog can influence the typography.

For example, if there is a non-typographic quotation mark (") in your text, WordPress tries to recognize, whether it is at the beginning or the end of a quote. If WordPress assumes it is at the beginning, standard WordPress replaces it by “, otherwise by ”. One aim of Intypo is to improve the recognition of these cases, even if the quote is e.g. in parenthesis or brackets. The recognition of single quotes is even more complicated, because they might be confused with apostrophes.

One problem with WordPress replacing the quotation marks is, that the style of quotation varies from language to language, but default WordPress always applies the English style. This is fine for Irish, Spanish, or Portuguese, but not desirable for other languages. In addition, several languages allow more than one style of quotation. For German texts, we have three different styles:„…” is the most popular. In print, the Guillemet marks »…« are common, but some publishers like the Rowohlt Verlag use the French direction «…», which is also more common in Switzerland.

So, what Intypo does, is give you the option to decide which style of quotation should be used in your blog. To help you find the right for your language, Intypo knows the typography for 23 European languages, from Portuguese to Turkish, from Norwegian to Italian etc. You can select anyone of these, no matter what language your texts are written in, even if it is not one of the 23.

Here is an example: If you type "lorem ipsum 'dolor' sit amet."WordPress by default displays

“Lorem ipsum ‘dolor’ sit amet.”

With Intypo, you can select e.g.

„Lorem ipsum ‚dolor‘ sit amet.“

or

»Lorem ipsum ›dolor‹ sit amet.«

or

«Lorem ipsum ‹dolor› sit amet.»

for a German text. If it was French, just select

« Lorem ipsum ‹ dolor › sit amet. »

Like the original texturize function, Intypo also replaces apostrophes, dashes, ellipses, and trademark symbols by typographic equivalents.